The brain’s visual system and, in particular, its visual cortex is activated in people that are blind since early in life. Studies have shown that blind people are better at detecting things touching their skin close together than are people with sight. People that are blind seem to have a particularly acute sense of touch. Are they faster at perceiving touch?

Dr. Daniel Goldreich’s team just published the paper “Vibrotactile Masking Experiments Reveal Accelerated Somatosensory Processing in Congenitally Blind Braille Readers” (October 27, 2010 in The Journal of Neuroscience) that suggests the answer is yes.

Fast Braille readers encounter a raised dot about every 50 millisecond. Sighted people would not be able to perceive a raised dot encountered so rapidly. They’d either simply not perceive the first or second raised dot they encountered or they would perceive the two dots as one dot. These phenomena are known as perceptual interference.

The research team set up a series of experiments to test blind and sighted people on detection and discrimination tasks. They showed that all of their sighted and blind participants performed equally well on simple detection and discrimination tasks. However, on the tasks that included perceptual interference, people blind since early in life differed significantly from those with sight.

In fact, those blind since early in life were the fastest Braille readers and were able to perceive individual touch stimuli faster than any other group. They concluded that early onset blindness leads to accelerated perceptual processing, which in turn enables rapid Braille reading.